A House in St John’s Wood by Matthew Spender review – a remarkable and moving family memoir

Matthew Spender, son of poet Stephen Spender, shows how we are all shaped by the strangeness of our families

In an age of bravely honest kiss-and-tell memoirs, it is hard to overstate how bravely honest Matthew Spender’s book is. It is the most truthful account we have had of the poet Stephen Spender and an unusually candid book for any son to write about his parents. It is also fearless in its self-exposure. We learn that Matthew Spender had a mastectomy after misguidedly breastfeeding an abandoned kitten; we are presented with a full list of the women he has loved.

Stephen Spender’s credibility has declined in the two decades since his death following attempts to sanitise both his political and sexual reputation. Having sacrificed much of her life for her husband, his widow, Natasha, insisted on preserving the myth of Spender as a contentedly uxorious heterosexual who knew nothing of the CIA funding of his magazine Encounter.

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